OpenDJ: Troubleshooting LDAP SSL connections

Troubleshooting Secure Socket Layer (SSL, also now standardized as TLS) issues is not trivial and there is no secret sauce specific to OpenDJ.

Should an LDAP SSL connection fails due to the server, you should find a descriptive error message in the server’s errors log (in logs/errors). But sometime the connection is aborted by the client with some obscure message. Often we see a message ending with ” javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: no cipher suites in common“.

Java has some debugging capabilities embedded and they are pretty easy to use with the OpenDJ LDAP directory server, which just need to be restarted with some additional arguments: -Djavax.net.debug=all or -Djavax.net.debug=ssl.

There are two ways to add extra arguments to the OpenDJ server startup command, using an environment variable, or using the java.properties file.

Using env variable

– you define the OPENDS_JAVA_ARGS environment variable. And you restart the server. If you do so, make sure you include all previous arguments.

Edit the java.properties file in the config directory.
Since you probably only want to track the OpenDS directory server SSL access, you should append the -Djavax.net.debug=ssl,handshake,trustmanager args to the start-ds line (rather than applying it to all commands).

This will help you to identify what part of the secure connection is failing and fix it.

Note that -Djavax.net.debug=ssl enables debug of the SSL connections, while -Djavax.net.debug=all enables full debugging including use of certificates, and more. You can also find more debug options by using -Djavax.net.debug=help.